Release of the Week: John Mayer – TSFE (Wave One)

Mayer sets high expectations with first four songs

It is no secret: I have been waiting for this day for a long time. Three years after his last album, Paradise Valley, “Wave One” of John Mayer’s newest project, The Search for Everything, is finally here!

Earlier this month, Mayer announced via Facebook that he will be releasing his album in sections, or “waves,” as he is calling them. “The album will be released four songs at a time. Every month. There were too many songs to ever get out the door at once,” he wrote. That means there will be 48 new songs released by Mayer in 2017, the most music he has ever put out in a year.

January’s “Wave One,” out yesterday, holds the album’s single, “Love on the Weekend” (the first single since Mayer’s 2014 cover of Beyonce’s “XO”), as well as “Moving on and Getting Over,” “Changing,” and “You’re Gonna Live Forever in Me.” “My heart’s racing. These songs represent literally hundreds of hours of living inside of these little worlds. And more to come,” Mayer wrote on Twitter.

In his most recent interview with Rolling Stone, Mayer explained that he wanted to work on a project unlike anything he has ever been a part of: “My starting point is, ‘I want to leave the Earth as a writer. I wasn’t interested in doing anything I’ve done before, and I wanted to stoke the fire of abstraction and just start punching hard.”

And punch hard he did. Mayer’s signature guitar sound shines through in the likes of “Moving on and Getting Over” and “Changing,” while “You’re Gonna Live Forever in Me” is a touchingly simple piano and strings ballad.

I’ve had Wave One on repeat all day and am (impatiently) waiting for more.